Talking about why he joined LIV Golf for the first time, Paul Casey said that his caddy John McLaren’s health and his own physical exhaustion were two of the main reasons.
As part of the second wave of players who left for LIV Golf in 2022, the winner of the 2021 Dubai Desert Classic said on the Are You Not Entertained? podcast that McLaren, who is affectionately known as Johnny “Long Socks,” had surgery last year to remove a brain tumor and that the two of them had to cut back on their schedule, which Casey estimated at 30 events a year.
The former DP World Tour and PGA Tour player Casey said, “I was really burned out, and it’s interesting to hear what you guys have to say—it’s all about the fan, and I think that’s why sports exist.”
“But I had been playing golf professionally for a very long time, and I was literally worn out from COVID, everything else, and my roles on the European Tour, DP World Tour, and PGA Tour.”Get hurt and generally being unhappy with the state of the game of golf.
I simply wanted to try something new. That was a long answer to a short question, but I have to say that I am extremely content playing on LIV at the moment.”You know my dear caddie Johnny McLaren, Johnny long socks as he’s known?
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Johnny and I have been best friends and a team for the last eight years. Well Johnny had a brain tumor removed last April,” Casey said about his caddie, who also took time off from carrying at the end of 2021.
“There’s a lot going on when you don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives. Johnny and I talked about this, and it’s another reason why we went to LIV—we couldn’t sustain what we were doing.”We were sending out false positives during the COVID protocols testing at the end of the year in 2021.
If you showed up at the tournament in Japan, you would be locked up in a hotel room for 10 days—a pretty small room by all accounts—and we both basically reached our breaking point and said, “We can’t do this anymore.” More information about why I’m doing what I’m doing now comes from knowing Johnny’s health problems at the time and what we were going through.
Casey is currently playing in the Porsche Singapore Classic on the DP World Tour. This is his first action on the DP World Tour since switching to LIV Golf.
